Koko

‘Saw plenty of those in your day.’

It was a question, but again he could do no more than nod.

Two young soldiers so fresh they could not have been more than a week in the field sat on a grassy dike and tilted canteens to their mouths. ‘Those boys were killed alongside my son,’ Daisy said. A wet wind ruffled their short hair. Lean oxen wandered in the blasted field behind them. Conor tasted plastic – that curdled deathlike taste of warm water in a plastic canteen.

With the entranced, innocent voice of a man speaking more to himself than his listeners, Daisy supplied a commentary on men hauling 3.5-inch rocket shells to the roof of a building, a bunch of privates lollygagging in front of a wooden shack soon to become the headquarters of PFC Wilson Manly, soldiers smoking weed, soldiers asleep in a dusty wasteland that looked like the outskirts of LZ Sue, hatless grinning soldiers posing with impassive Vietnamese girls…

‘Here’s some guy, I don’t know who,’ Daisy said. Once Conor saw the face, he was barely able to hear the lawyer’s voice. ‘Big so-and-so, wasn’t he? I can guess what he was up to with that little girl.’

It was an honest mistake. His new wife had jumped-started Daisy’s gonads – why else was he coming home at four-thirty in the afternoon?

Tim Underhill, bandanna around his neck, was the big soldier in the photograph. And the ‘girl’ was one of his flowers – a young man so feminine he might have been an actual girl. Smiling at the photographer, they stood on a narrow street crammed with jeeps and rickshaws in what must have been Da Nang or Hue.

‘Son?’ Daisy was saying. ‘You okay, son?’

For a second Conor wondered if Daisy would give him Underbill’s picture.

‘You look a little white, son,’ Daisy said.

‘Don’t worry,’ Conor said. ‘I’m fine.’

He merely scanned the rest of the photographs.

‘The truth is in the pudding,’ he said. ‘You can’t forget this kind of shit.’

Then Ben Roehm decided he needed another new man to do the taping in the kitchen and hired Victor Spitalny.

Conor had been a few minutes late to work. When he came into the ruined kitchen a stranger with a long streaky-blond ponytail was slouching against the skeletal framing of the new partition. The new man wore a raveled turtleneck under a plaid shirt. A worn toolbelt hung beneath his beerbelly. There was a new scab on the bridge of his nose, old scabs the color of overdone toast on the knuckles of his left hand. Red lines threaded the whites of his eyes. Conor’s memory released a bubble filled with the indelible odor of burning kerosene-soaked shit. Vietnam, a ground-pounder.

Ben Roehm and the other carpenters and painters in the crew sat or sprawled on the floor, drinking morning coffee from their thermoses. ‘Conor, meet Tom Woyzak, your new taping partner,’ Ben said. Woyzak stared at Conor’s outstretched hand for a few beats before grudgingly shaking it.

Drink it down, Conor remembered, boo-koo good for your insides.

All morning they silently taped sheetrock on opposite sides of the kitchen.

After Mrs Daisy had come and gone with a pot of fresh coffee at eleven, Woyzak growled, ‘See how she came on to me? Before this job is over I’ll be up in the bitch’s bedroom, nailing her to the floor.’

‘Sure, sure,’ Conor said, laughing.

Woyzak was instantly across the kitchen, leaving a steaming trail of coffee and a spinning cup on the floor. His teeth showed. He pushed his face up to Conor’s. ‘Don’t get in my way, faggot, or I’ll waste you.’

‘Back off,’ Conor said. He shoved him away. Conor was set to move this lunatic off-center with a head fake, step into him and mash his adam’s apple with a left, but Woyzak dusted his shoulders as though Conor’s touch had dirtied him and backed away.

At the end of the day Woyzak dropped his toolbelt in a corner of the kitchen and silently watched Conor pack his tools away for the night.

‘Ain’t you a neat little fucker,’ he said.

Conor slammed his toolbox shut. ‘Do you have many friends, Woyzak?’

‘Do you think these people are going to adopt you? These people are not going to adopt you.’

‘Forget it.’ Conor stood up.

‘So you were over there too?’ Woyzak asked in a voice that put as little curiosity as possible into the question.

‘Yeah.’

‘Clerk-typist?’

In a rage, Conor shook his head and turned away.

‘What outfit were you in?’

‘Ninth Battalion, Twenty-Fourth Infantry.’

Woyzak’s laugh sounded like wind blowing over a loose grave. Conor kept on walking until he was safely out of the house.

He sat straddling his motorcycle for a long time, looking down at the dark grey stones of the drive, deliberately not thinking. The sky and the air were as dark as the gravel. Cold wind blew against his face. He could feel sharp individual stones digging into the soles of his boots.

For a moment Conor was certain that he was going to fire up his Harley and go, just keep moving in a blur of speed and distance until he had flown without stopping across hundreds of miles. Speed and travel gave him a pleasant, light, kind of empty feeling. Conor saw highways rolling out before him, the neon signs in front of motels, hamburgers sizzling on the griddles of roadside diners.

Perched on his bike in the cold air, he heard doors slamming inside the house. Ben Roehm’s big baritone rang out.

He wished that Mike Poole would call him up and say, We’re on the way, babyface, pack your bags and meet us at the airport.

Ben Roehm opened the door and fixed Conor with his eyes. He stepped outside and pulled on his heavy fleece-lined denim coat. ‘See you tomorrow?’

‘I got nowhere else to go,’ Conor said.

Ben Roehm nodded. Conor kicked his Harley into noisy life and rode off as the rest of the crew came through the door.

For three or four days Woyzak and Conor ignored each other. When Charlie Daisy finally scented another veteran and appeared with his box of medals and his photo album, Conor put down his tools and wandered out. He couldn’t bear to hang around while Thomas Woyzak looked at Underbill’s picture.

The night before what turned out to be his last day, Conor woke up at four from a nightmare about M. O. Dengler and Tim Underhill. At five he got out of bed. He made a pot of coffee and drank nearly all of it before he left for work. Pieces of the dream clung to Conor all morning.

He is cowering in a bunker with Dengler, and they are enduring a firefight. Underhill must be in a dark portion of the same bunker or in another right beside it, for his rich voice, sounding a great deal like Ben Roehm’s, carries over most of the noise.

There had been no bunkers in Dragon Valley.

The lieutenant’s corpse sits upright against the far side of the bunker, its legs splayed out. Blood from a neat slash in the lieutenant’s throat has sheeted down over his trunk, staining his chest solidly red.

‘Dengler!’ Conor says in his dream. ‘Dengler, look at the lieutenant!’ That asshole got us into this mess and now he’s dead!’

Another great light burst in the sky, and Conor sees a Koko card protruding from Lieutenant Beevers’ mouth.

Conor touches Dengler’s shoulder and Dengler’s body rolls over onto his legs and Conor sees Dengler’s mutilated face and the Koko card in his gaping mouth. He screams in both the dream and real life and wakes up.

Conor got to work early and waited outside for the others. A few minutes later Ben Roehm pulled up in his Blazer with the two other members of the crew who lived up in his part of the state. They were men with babies and rent to pay, but too young to have been in Vietnam. As he watched them get out of the cab, Conor realized that he felt surprisingly paternal toward these sturdy young carpenters – they didn’t have enough experience to know the difference between Ben Roehm and most of the other contractors around.